Jack of Harts

The Martian Affair did not advance to the top 10 finalist level of consideration for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest. I got the word today from the contest organizer. He did say he liked the story, so that is good. But in the end there were many good submissions to the contest, as I expected. I am disappointed that my story did not make it to the final round of judging, but it is not the first time a publisher has declined to accept one of my stories.

The silver lining is that I will get to publish this short story myself in the near future. This is in fact the second completed story in my queue ready for publication. The second Wolfenheim Story is ready, complete with cover design. I had intended to publish it last year, but production issues cropped in and slowed me down, which is why The Thunderbird Affair got the honor last year. Wolfenheim Emergent will come soon, though. Have no worries on that account.

I have a third story roughed out and heavily written. It was actually fully written some time ago as part of another story but was cut for word count and the fact that it just wasn’t needed to tell the story I was telling. I am now working to make it a self contained short story of its own and will publish it when done. It has had a number of names over time, but I think I have finally settled on The Audacious Affair. The other names died because they telegraphed the story too well. And I like this name. It doesn’t have the same bite as the original name, but it has teeth.

And I learned long ago that when your name is on the lips of others, you should make certain it has teeth so they will not forget you. 😉

This is the third night in a row of hitting less than 20 actual degrees below zero. Yesterday the actual temperature was -28 in my hometown and the wind chill hit -60. This is the third time in my life I have seen cold snaps of this kind.

The first was when I was very young in the early 1980s. Northern Minnesota had wind chills of -100 and actual temperatures of around -40. Wind chills were calculated differently back then, and I don’t know the modern number, but that was cold. I have pictures of me standing on top of the car that was a snowdrift that winter.

The second was in the late 1990s when I lost another car in a snowdrift. And it hit actual temperatures below -20 on the scale. I don’t even know what the wind chills were back then. All I know is that walking three blocks to pick my car up from the shop was an experience that will live with me until the day I die. My eyeballs felt like they were freezing behind my glasses. It literally hurt to keep my eyes open so I could see where I was walking.

And now…no joke. This is cold. Up here in Minnesota we like to joke about the cold. It gets below zero and we laugh. We ask each other if it’s warm enough for yah and chuckle. We aren’t laughing now. Well, we are, but…this is seriously cold, even for the best of us.

I work in a hotel and multiple heating units just totally failed. I don’t mean that they couldn’t keep up with the cold and the temperature dropped. I mean the cold seeped into their heating units while they were on and froze them up. It feels like half my coworkers are staying at the hotel right now because it’s too cold for them to go home. Their cars won’t start. The roads are so cold the salt and sand don’t give us traction so it’s not safe to drive. I haven’t taken my JEEP off four-wheel drive all week. And I’m starting it every 4 hours so it can warm up so it can start in another 4 hours so it can start up and take me to work. And I’m sliding the whole way there at 15 to 20 MPH because the roads are so deeply frozen.

Schools are closed because we don’t want kids standing out on the street for fifteen minutes waiting for the buses to show up. The US Post Office isn’t delivering mail. This is the kind of cold that literally kills people. And it has this year. It has.

This is truly an historical cold to remember.